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Schnelli was clear about his own thinking. "I think I'm not sure. I'm not speaking for Bitcoin Core here; I'm speaking for myself here. If it turns out that Classic takes off—everybody's running Classic—and if there's a hard fork on the road, I think Core would probably need to follow because I think Core won't risk splitting the whole community. But that's my personal opinion; I don't want to say that for every Bitcoin Core developer." The underlying concern was simple: if most nodes and miners switched to Classic, Core would lose its influence over protocol development. Hard forks carry enough friction that jumping ship involves real costs, yet the block size battle had shown how much hunger existed to escape the constraints Bitcoin Core maintained.

The complication is that Classic doesn't exist yet. Large companies like Coinbase and Xapo, along with figures such as Roger Ver, had thrown their names behind the initiative, but the software remained unbuilt. "Prominent people like Roger Ver and Bitstamp—they all seem to agree on Classic. But actually, there's no code changes. Today they merged two code changes. I think it was something around the ReadMe file. So there's been nothing implemented yet for Classic—no hard fork, no code," Schnelli explained. The timeline called for the source code to arrive before January closed. After that, any node operator could flip the switch and register their vote for larger blocks.

But this raises a deeper question: Can Bitcoin Core prevent any of this? The answer is no. The legitimate Bitcoin ledger is whichever one the network's participants choose to support. "I agree if they get the economy behind them then we might need to follow. That's not a problem. I personally have no problem with following other opinions. I mean, if people think bigger blocks are good, then Bitcoin goes that way. It's nothing we can stop," Schnelli said. Bitcoin XT had tried a similar play with BIP 101 and failed to gather consensus. Classic's 2 MB pitch was simpler and had attracted a following.

What nobody knows is where the Chinese mining pools will land. They command the majority of the network's computing power, and they haven't committed to either side. The answer to whether bigger blocks arrive may not come until Classic launches and nodes begin picking sides.